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Blender Material Preview

Hi...

Finally i think i can show a little thing i've been working on for the past weeks...

Is nothing awesome but i think it can be really useful for a lot of cases...

Is a Material Preview Scene, it has everything necessary, you can tests reflections, refractions, raytracer depth, GI, caustics, it even has SSS bar and bubbles, everything has been studied carefully to be as correct as possible and to give the user a good test scene for realistic materials and much more than that...

Because of the way i created the scene, it can be used with practically any render engine you want, even Blender Internal: actually THAT was the renderer i intended to test with this scene.

Is not finished yet, but is almost done, give me another week to finish last details and i'll post it in case anyone wants to use it... Is not perfect but it works really well and the best of all, is Blender made, with Blender Logo (with correct proportions and everything) :P

This are some little tests i've made with the scene, hopefully in a week i'll post a couple more tests with some mapping tests and i'll try to create a mini documentation file if anyone wants to use it.

Maybe this scene could be a feature built into Blender to test materials?

The SSS render shouldn't take 3 days if you use the SSS settings

Sweet Dragon dreams, lovely Dragon kisses, gorgeous Dragon hugs. How sweet would life be to romp with Dragons, teasing you with their fire and you being in their games, perhaps they can even turn you into one as well.
Adventures in Cycles; My official sketchbook

A little update... Nothing fancy here, just a couple of tests with mapping...

Everything seems to work fine, i even experimented with some displacement, i had to raise subdivisions to 4 and face count was more than 1.8M but it rendered smooth wothout problems ... probably even better results could be achieved with Kai Kostack's Adaptive Subdivision script

Wood material test

Bricks material test (with some displacement)

Today i'll start the mini documentation of the scene, hopefully in a couple of days finally i'll be able to post the .blend

Well, if you use the same brick texture like in this case you won't get the desired, realistic effect keeping in mind that the displacement is based on the equivalent grayscale values. Try using a separate texture for the displacement.

Hi recicledTrash... of course i used a custom created map based on grayscale values! otherwise it would be impossible in this case to have a good displacement...

But i had to try a lot of times to get the effect, i had to blur a lot the map and change the value of displacement everytime i changed the blur!... in miy experiences with Max, this is a lot easier and intuitive.

Looks very nice for testing materials. For a while I've been thinking it would be nice a couple of scenes more to preview materials. And the other day when Blendernation posted this PDF where Suzanne appears, I did like the test mesh for fluids (page 8), and is also nice the mesh for fabrics (page 13) although it could be better with a freezed Blender cloth simulation.

I saw that pdf and the fluids scene is very cool... the fabrics one not so much...

Personally i don't use many scenes for material testing, in general, this scene could be used to test fluids and fabrics materials too (that's the reason for bubbles and the SSS-bar)... but who knows, in the future maybe i could create a nice fluids material test scene and a cloth one.